Green Is The New Gold

It is finally Fall here on the farm. All of the plant life hails the end of the growing season by the turning of greens to browns or other autumn colors. However, as you can see in the picture above, not everything is a dull color yet. The lime green field is an alternative forage that my dad planted this year due to the lack of hay and silage from last years drought. It is called sorghum sudangrass and prefers less rain and lots of heat as it was originally intended for and grown in Northeastern Africa. I'm enjoying it's addition to the farmscape.

This Spring when I had my friends Courtney and Christopher up to visit I was browsing through a book of Christopher's on wild edible plants and noticed one which goes all over our farm and that I've always considered to be a weed. I read in this book that you could make marshmallows the old fashioned way out of this weed. All summer long I walked past a ton of these plants that adorned the cow lanes by the barn and kept thinking I should try using them. I could only remember they could be used to make marshmallows when I finally looked for information on Google, and therefore, I spent a good deal of time researching the marshmallow plant. I was a bit discouraged at first because all the pictures of marshmallow plants and their flowers looked very different from the little weed I was familiar with. At last I stumbled upon an explaination. This weed was not a marshmallow plant but rather the common mallow which is, I discovered, a cousin to marshmallow and also okra!

What marshmallow plants look like:

What common mallow plants look like:

There are some really cool, close up photos of the common mallow that a fellow in Canada took with a few nifty cameras: Photographs

Notice that the marshmallow plant grows tall and the common mallow tends to grown more like a ground cover. Being cousins though, they have similar properties and common mallow plants can be used for all of the same things as the marshmallow although they are less effective.  

Anyways, since I had read in Christopher's book that you could make marshmallows out of common mallow as the plant is mucilaginous, a couple of weeks ago I decided to see what this whole marshmallow business was all about. Luckily, I had some help picking the little fruits, also called "cheeses", from my sister Nellie and also from Brittany. A time consuming endeavor!

Here you see our collection of fruits:

Getting our tools and ingredients ready:

It wasn't a terribly long process but we started it around 6pm so it took the rest of the evening. Due to the summer heat and the lateness of the hour we were rather hot and tired by the end of it all.
It was Brittany's brilliant idea to make our own little YouTube video of our marshmallow adventure. It's a bit long, but then again, it's a longer process. The results were.. well, curious.
You can our experiment here: Making Marshmallows

The truth is, learning about the common mallow online was hard to do... when there were so many other interesting plants to learn about as well!!!
My mom owns an herb book too that I'd thumbed through but never really applied or studied a whole lot. Suddenly reading through it along with the information I found through Google opened a whole world of possibilities. I traveled down a number of rabbit trails and was constantly telling the nearest person about some awesome weed growing outside that could change their life! Sadly, since the Fall season is upon us, and with the number of harvest-able plants dwindling, I went out and gathered whatever I could find. Unfortunately I just missed the mullein season, but I found yarrow, common mallow, plantain, and nettle... all of these being ubiquitous in this region and therefore easy to obtain. (I also accidentally stumbled upon self-heal/heal-all, thinking it looked like hops)!

With these precious greens and other herbs my sister Emily donated to the cause I decided to make a salve. First I watched a video online about how to make salves to make sure I was doing it all right.

Then I stuffed a quart jar with a number of different herbs that had external healing properties covered them with coconut oil and a little extra virgin olive oil and put it in the crock-pot on low for a few days to be infused.

At first the jar kept floating in the water so I had to weight the jar down. Finally I decided to stir the herbs and oil a few times to get the air bubbles out. 

The last step was to strain the oil out of the herbs with a cheese cloth and melt beeswax into the infused oil, being careful not to overheat it. Then I added some essential oil and grapefruit seed extract to help preserve the salve and I put it into small jars. Needless to say it made a LOT more than I expected it to. I'm going to have to buy a number of smaller jars and I'll probably give a bunch of it away, because I don't know how my family will be able to use all of it. I am excited to see how well it works.
The trick with herbal remedies is that they take a lot more patience and time to use and people are so accustomed to pharmaceutical drugs which usually work much more rapidly than herbs, though they aren't as healthy.

It looks green enough to work! ;)

I have learned so far that herbs take time: Time to learn about them, time to prepare them and time to apply them. In the long run I think it'll pay off though. It's the wealth in every weed patch that God has provided for us and I'm excited to learn more about what He has in store for us out of doors...

Genesis 1:29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.